The last Western
Subtitle: Deadwood and the end of American empire
By: edited by Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman
Publisher: Continuum International Pub. Group
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9781441126306; 9781441164582
Subjects: Deadwood (Television program)
Description: "Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Deadwood and the forms of American empire / Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman; title: Fabulous retroactivity and invisible agency: democracy, capitalism, and the history of the present. Vile task: founding and democracy in Deadwood's imperial imagination / Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr.; title: The Gothic frontier of modernity: the "invisible hand" of state-formation in Deadwood / Julia M. Wright; title: "It's all f***ing amalgamation and capital, ain't it?": Deadwood, the Pinkertons, and the closing of the frontier / Jeffrey Scraba and John David Miles; title: No law at all in Deadwood: race, violence, and the state in contemporary America. Securing the color: the racial economy of Deadwood / Daniel Worden; title: Listening to the thunder: Deadwood and the extraordinary depiction of ordinary violence / Justin A. Joyce; title: A terrible beauty: Deadwood, frontier rhetoric, and U.S. hegemony in the post-9/11 era / Erik Altenbernd and Alex Young; title: "A sovereign f***ing community": gender, domesticity, and the sexual politics of Deadwood. Messages from invisible sources: surveillance and the public sphere in Deadwood / Mark L. Berrettini; title: "The world is less than perfect": nontraditional family structures in Deadwood / Paul Zinder; title: The return of the father: Deadwood and the contemporary gender politics of complexity / David Greven.